Re: Trademark Infringement

Subject: Re: Trademark Infringement
From: dmbrown -at- brown-inc -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 16:47:00 -0700


I wrote:

> Good heavens, no. If it were, the entire nation of Ireland would be
> guilty of infringement every time they displayed a four-leaf clover.

Bonnie Granat wrote:

> You think these are four-leaf clovers? Had they looked so to me, I would
> not have asked about it. But I don't think these are four-leaf clovers.
> Microsoft's is a variation of the window theme, and lingo apparently
> stole the internal proportions to produce a skewed design that marginally
> resembles a four-leaf clover. MS's design is clearly not intended to be a
> four-leaf clover.


Your web page asks if I (the reader) think "this" (the two logos displayed there) constitutes copyright infringement.

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you are asking whether Lingo's logo is too similar to Microsoft's OfficeOnline logo.

I do understand that Microsoft's logo is an evolutionary development of the familiar Windows logo, thank you. I believe the Lingo logo is a stylized perspective view of a four-leaf clover--that's certainly what it looks like to me.

More to the point, though, note that the Lingo nodes are precisely proportioned to create a vanishing point in the upper right corner, creating the sense that you're looking up and to the right from the lower left node. The nodes in Microsoft's Office logo decrease in size in a counterclockwise direction, creating no sense of perspective. The Lingo logo is a single color, whereas the Office logo uses Microsoft's well known four-color theme. The Lingo nodes are "filled in"; the Office nodes are simply outlined. The outlines of the Lingo nodes are separate, depicting four individual entities; the Office nodes are created by the overlapping of a single line, implying a unified entity, which is precisely their point.

You assume Lingo stole something, although I'm not sure what you mean by "the internal proportions" given the differences I've just cited. (I can't even imagine why a voice-over-IP company would expect to capitalize on some similarity to an office productivity suite--if that was their goal, they'd have been more likely to call their product OfficeTalk or something similar.)

By contrast, I assume Lingo paid someone to design a logo they liked, and that any similarity is in the eye of the beholder--it happens.

Finally, I never said *both* logos are four-leaf clovers. I meant that there's no infringement because the Lingo logo looks no more like the Office logo than would any other stylized representation of a four-leaf clover.

See?

--David

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Re: Trademark Infringement: From: dmbrown

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